General Discussion

http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/fallout

When this eventually launches, I'm all in. A new tool under development by Oregon State computer scientists could radically alter the way that communications work on the web. Privly is a sort of manifesto-in-code, a working argument for a more private, less permanent Internet. The system we have now gives all the power to the service providers. That seemed to be necessary, but Privly shows that it is not: Users could have a lot more power without giving up social networking. Just pointing that out is a valuable contribution to the ongoing struggle to understand and come up with better ways of sharing and protecting ourselves online. "Companies like Twitter, Google, and Fa…

An onrush of condemnation and criticism kept the SOPA and PIPA acts from passing earlier this year, but US lawmakers have already authored another authoritarian bill that could give them free reign to creep the Web in the name of cybersecurity. As congressmen in Washington consider how to handle the ongoing issue of cyberattacks, some legislators have lent their support to a new act that, if passed, would let the government pry into the personal correspondence of anyone of their choosing. H.R. 3523, a piece of legislation dubbed the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (or CISPA for short), has been created under the guise of being a necessary implement in Americ…

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City! Modders sorted through the game's code, and claims to have found a character model of Luke Skywalker along with details on a Hoth mission. The developer was rumoured to have been working on the game back in 2010, so this might be all that's left of their work.

Don't know who I'm more upset with. The police, or the wireless providers. Glad I don't use or own a cell phone. The documents paint a picture of a surveillance free-for-all. While departments seem to have avoided warrantless access to phone calls themselves—which would likely run afoul of wiretapping laws—police departments have sought access to a wide variety of other user information. The legal standards used for cell phone tracking requests vary widely by police department. Some law enforcement agencies do not track cell phones, or have concluded that the Fourth Amendment requires them to obtain a warrant in order to track user locations. But many more reported obtai…

Just read this small op-ed. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/28/the-power-of-young-adult-fiction/adults-should-read-adult-books The comments are pretty great. Check those out, too.

http://twitter.com/#!/petermolydeux

Earlier this week Comcast came under fire for possible net neutrality violations after it was revealed that streams of on-demand video that it delivers to subscribers via Xbox Live won’t count toward its monthly 250 GB bandwidth cap. Well, the way Comcast delivers that content hasn’t changed, but the language it uses to describe the delivery method has been updated, perhaps in an effort to draw less attention to the issue. For those who forgot, the pertinent part of the FAQ previously tried to distinguish its VOD streams from those of competing video services like Netflix and Hulu Plus, saying that its content on Xbox was “being delivered over our private IP network and n…

http://maps.google.c...,0x0:0x0,0&z=17 http://maps.google.c...t&utm_source=yt If you do street view on your house, it'll appear 8 bit, too

A bit pricey, but they're so worth it, I want them all. You can find them here

Popular video game consoles such as Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Xbox 360 may resemble the new battlefields for national security in the eyes of the U.S. military. The U.S. Navy has begun funding a project to hack previously owned game consoles in an effort to dig up gamers' online chat room information and other stored data. U.S. console gamers can breathe a tiny sigh of relief for now, because the current project forbids targeting "U.S. persons." Instead, the Navy wants a California-based company called Obscure Technologies to buy video game consoles bought in used overseas markets, and to create computer forensic tools capable of hacking such consoles. "This project …

It's widely being reported around the net now a few key details regarding Sony's next console. The successor to the PS3, code named "Orbis", is supposedly going to be running on advanced AMD architecture and graphics cards rather than Sony's proprietary Cell chip. This is good news because it will allow much greater integration with the PC market and would be much easier to program for (a problem many developers complained about with Cell). With a planned release of sometime in 2013, there is some key things that have me a little unsettled. One of them I can deal with, and the other one sucks. I can deal with the proposed idea of Sony absolutely 100% not caring about PS…

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Last week, RIAA CEO Cary Sherman confirmed that the country's largest ISPs will voluntarily roll out by July 1 a "graduated response" program aimed at discouraging unauthorized downloading. A Memorandum of Understanding published last summer outlines the program, which was developed without user feedback. Under the new system, a rightsholder accusing an ISP subscriber of infringment will trigger a series of ever-increasing consequences. The responses are graduated in the sense that they escalate after each accusation, beginning with steps aimed at educating users about copyright and culminating in the Orwellian-sounding "mitigation measures" -- bandwidth throttling or acc…

A teacher in South Carolina is on adminstrative leave after the parent of a 14-year-old complained that Orson Scott Card's classic novel was 'pornographic' The parent of a 14-year-old at Schofield Middle School complained to school officials and the police after a teacher at the school reportedly read to his class from the novel. The parent described Ender's Game as "pornographic", local press reported, and complained about its subject matter. Like The Hunger Games, Ender's Game sees teenagers pitting their battle skills against each other. In Card's Hugo and Nebula award-winning story, though, the hero Ender has been recruited for the Battle School, where Earth's most ta…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CB!

The beginning is a bit slow, but please stick with it. I can't express how important the message is. Get to know Joseph Kony. Make him famous enough to capture! **Update** Read these two links before you share the video with anyone, and before you drop a dime in contributions. http://thedailywh.at/2012/03/07/on-kony-2012-2/ http://facecrooks.com/Internet-Safety-Privacy/kony-2012-invisible-children-awareness-campaign-read-this-before-sharing-their-video.html Sorry for alerting you to something that may not be as helpful as it first sounded.

http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/android-aware-stunning-game-tech-demo.html Just go watch the link,short video, it's amazing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pNNTBF_4ns

Only days after clearing Congress, US President Barack Obama signed his name to H.R. 347 on Thursday, officially making it a federal offense to cause a disturbance at certain political events — essentially criminalizing protest in the States. Read on http://rt.com/usa/news/trespass-bill-obama-secret-227/

I just finished reading the Game Informer article on this as well (very in depth). THIS is the next big Assassin's Creed I've been waiting for. New setting (American Revolution!), new character, and finally getting to whatever's going to happen in 2012. I really hope this wraps up the main arc of the AC story. Sure there can and most likely will be more, but I really don't want it to have all this craziness start happening, then have it just left to be continued in another game. The last couple AC games were still pretty good, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they were just sort of filler after the awesomeness that was AC2. I imagine one day there will be an Assas…

<iframe class="imgur-album" width="100%" height="550" frameborder="0" src="http://imgur.com/a/v7hyz/embed"></iframe><br><br>Little something I have been working on... more details later

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Where were teachers like this when I was in school? http://kotaku.com/5890278/samurai-yetis-and-ninja-werewolves-how-one-teacher-turned-sixth-grade-into-an-mmo Good idea to get kids motivated.